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I Was 19 Once (A Letter To A Suicidal Stranger)
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I Was 19 Once (A Letter To A Suicidal Stranger) Note: I've been starting and abandoning post after post the last few days. I can't seem to get a string of thoughts together to make a coherent entry, but nostalgia has been hitting hard as well. In order to hopefully break this writer's -- maze, scramble, ricochet, pinball? -- I've just included the from a reply to someone who 19 felt since he hadn't accomplished anything, he was destined for failure. He spoke of depression and suicide, and I wanted to show him that 19 could be just a start. I was 19 once, I felt the most and did the most and experienced the most during that year. It started at 18 in November 2001 when I had a friend over to watch a movie, I don't remember which film it was. It bored us and he told me he was leaving the next day, driving out to Colorado to work the ski lifts. "I want to do that, that sounds amazing, I'm so bored," I told him. I convinced him to let me tag along although I couldn't drive. We left in the morning, with everything I owned in a red Darth Maul backpack, and drove from the Midwest up into the Rockies where I passed out in a gas station due to the elevation change. I was too cold and too excited to sleep, making my way through orientation and finding sleep at a hostel in a little tourist town. I woke up at 4 a.m. to catch the bus an hour into the mountains, watching the sunrise while I stomped around in the snow and put rich and celebrities and Olympians on ski lifts until evening when I dragged myself back onto the bus toward that hostel home. I burned out quickly and quit Snowmass ski life, and lived day to day by washing dishes and showing tourists around the brick sidewalks and hot springs, giving them a taste of real life in their treks across the country. I snuggled up to Australian hippies and Seattle doctors, traded poems with boys from Georgia and listened to Cat Stevens with locals. I got a job at a camera shop after the owner saw my immaculate handwriting on my application; no interview necessary, he knew I was articulate and precise, thorough and intelligent. I moved in with a coworker, a curly haired blonde with too much energy for it to be organic. The amount of cocaine we did was only matched by the words I put onto paper that year, lengthy paragraphs of a lost girl trying to climb out of whiskey nights and speed filled workweeks. Our neighbor was a grey haired rafting company owner, and we spent weekends drinking and sliding down class 4 rapids, tan and careless. One day this blonde came home, told me she'd scored some meth and planned to do it all day the next day; I knew it was time to go. If I stayed in that two bedroom condo, I would stop living -- either through addiction or death. I was already unhappy with how much I had let myself stop feeling, and I had stopped writing and drawing completely. The baggies and tinfoil with coke residue littered our counters, always free because we were young and pretty and smiled a lot. That night was a going away party at the hostel for a friend who had arrived months before like I had. I made my way downtown and into the fenced backyard crowded by Irish, Californian, Japanese tourists looking for an experience they could carve into their memories. I said hello to the regulars, the long term visitors, I introduced myself to an Argentinian beauty who was looking for a rich man to keep her comfortable. My friend was from Massachusetts, and I met his friends who had come to visit and take him back to the city; among them was a man with long hair and cerulean eyes, a guitar player who was easy going and unassuming. He was going back home to Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston, via Greyhound the next morning. "I want to do that, that sounds amazing, I'm so bored," I told him. He said he would welcome my company, that it would be amazing, that he was leaving at 8 in the morning. I finished my drink and went home. My red backpack sat in the closet, and that night I packed my clothes, my sketchbooks, my pens. I slept a few hours, and I woke up the next morning listening to Jurassic 5 and I put on my All-Stars. Writing a quick note to my roommate to tell her she could keep or sell anything I left behind, I left my key on the counter and walked out of the apartment. I took the morning bus toward the Greyhound, bought a ticket, and had a smoke outside the station while I felt the hot July sun start to move in on the valley we stayed in. This long haired, blue eyed man walked up, incredulous at my bravery. He didn't think I'd come, he thought I wasn't serious, and he was excited and ecstatic at my impulsivity. We climbed onto the stuffy bus, his guitar and bag stashed away, my backpack beside me. I didn't feel nervous, I didn't feel fear; the novelty of a new life, a new adventure kept me from sleeping and we talked for hours. In Omaha we had a layover, and spent the night on the floor with other travelers, playing<b> songs </font></b>that we all sang along to, drawing pictures and writing phrases in notebooks of people we barely knew and would never see again. The bus arrived, and we continued on. In days we covered most of the country and this man fell in love with me, or the idea of me. When we finally climbed the stairs to his little apartment he shared with four others, we fell into bed and slept and fucked for two days. I wanted to see the city, and he wanted to show me why he loved every inch of it. I was used to a small town, and soon felt lost in the sidewalks and brick that covered the dirt below us. I felt my soul slip a little and fade, and found comfort in the arboretum near our apartment, and spent days and nights among the trees while trying to remember what fresh air felt like. It was time to go again, I felt myself getting lost in a city where no one knew me and I couldn’t see myself. I called my mother, asked her for a bus ticket back to the Midwest, and she agreed. Long hair and blue eyes couldn’t keep me here no matter how intense he loved, no matter how comfortable his incense smelling rooms was. I needed the trees and grass and clear sky around me, and I left on an August morning while he was at work. I knew he couldn’t handle who I was, who I had been before, and who I wanted to be. It wasn’t enough, and I wrote another quick note telling him I needed to let him go. The bus ride home was quick and uneventful, and I meant only to stay with my parents for a few weeks before hitching down toward Georgia, or Florida, some southern state I hadn’t yet fully experienced. 9/ happened just then, and transit shut down everywhere. I was trapped, and I let a mediocre life and a mediocre man happen to me. I spent years existing where I was, letting life drain me and I lost the sparkle and brilliance of opportunities pass by until three months ago when I couldn’t take another minute of normalcy. I moved out, and I am trying to find where I was at 19, a fantastic age of just being thrown into the world with every possibility. It is impossible to feel pathetic or desperate when you’ve only just started to see what you can do and who you can do it with. It isn’t desperation you feel, it’s an urgency to live. It isn’t pathetic, it’s a blank page that you aren’t quite sure where to start in. Put your pen to paper, scribble your dreams and ideas, and tuck them into your soul. Live them and be them and share them, you’re 19 and you have time to feel and do and experience the most this year. |
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Hey Darlin, .........Nineteen years old with life spread out in front of you like six lanes of open highway and no hard driving in sight,.......... Sinfully Yours, backpocket13
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